It’s been a month since the final time that my small group got together at our leader, Annie Downs’, house.

What you need to know about my small group is that they have made living in Nashville incredible. There are lots of things that I like about this city, but my favorite part has been them. When you move away from home, you grow a lot. And for our group, we have been through all of that together. There has been all of the tears and laughs and life changes that you can imagine that have happened since we started meeting in the beginning of 2012.

If you’ve left home already, then you know that things can change a lot when you take the next step. For me, that happened when I moved to Nashville after I graduated from high school in Minnesota. While everything in my life was new and sort of inconsistent, I decided to join this small group. It made things consistent on Tuesday nights for 3.5 years. And now my Tuesdays look different. I’m not with my favorite people huddled on couches, eating amazing home cooked meals, and talking about life and Jesus in the safest place in Nashville I know. But while my Tuesdays are different, those 3.5 years gave me a different kind of consistent.

Now I have consistent relationships in my life with amazing people, many of whom I didn’t even know existed 4 years ago. Now I know I have a team of people behind me that I can truly talk to about pretty much anything. I know that makes me really lucky. I know that a lot of people only have one or two people that they can talk to about faith and challenges and victories and mistakes. But I have about 10 girls that I can call up and will be there when I need them.

Our group was crazy lucky to have each other and I know that there are more groups out there waiting to come together. So especially for those of you graduating high school and moving on to college in the fall, think about getting connected with a group of people that can be consistent and there for you during the changes of your next steps. It’s so worth taking a few hours a week to do something like this.

So this post is an encourager to do something like that but mainly it’s a BIG thank you and I love you to all the ladies that have majorly impacted my life because you were a part of this small group. Having committed and loving people during these years has made all the difference in my life. Thank you Annie for “raising” us in Nashville to run hard after Jesus and to show the power of doing that in community. As you (Annie) said during our last night, “We weren’t perfect and we made mistakes, but we did this right.”